The boss gave me a new cookbook: Happy Days with the Naked Chef, by Jamie Oliver, and I found a recipe for Pork Filets over Rhubarb. This interested me because i’ve never seen rhubarb used in such a way before. So this merited a try.
We’re going to have to improve the lighting in the kitchen up at the house, as once again the video is pretty dark. I contemplated re-shooting the whole thing, but i thought it wouldn’t be as fun on a re-shoot. And the whole idea here is low-tech, simple stuff. I promise the next kitchen shoot will be better.
Wikipedia has some good info on dandelion, though I don’t agree you have to always cook it down before eating. There are plenty of us who like it raw. If you like mustard greens, you’ll like dandelion.
You can grow it in your garden, it will last longer into the summer than most any other green. I think the horticultural version is milder, and I prefer the wild version. I was walking around the barn this weekend looking for dandelion, there is still a bunch of it around depsite the record heat wave. Dandelion starts growing early in the spring, flowers and quickly goes to seed. Dandelion then pops up again in the fall, so keep an eye out for it all through the growing season. You can even grow it in a cold frame or hoop house. Click these to see our how to build a hoop house and cold frame videos
Don’t harvest it from roadside areas or where your dogs like to hang out. 10-4?
if you want to learn more about foraging, here is a how-to book to get you started. I like this book, and learned a bunch about acorns, which you can make a flour with. who knew?
Watch this video on how to grow lettuce, mesclun and salad greens and learn how to harvest salad and lettuce.
Until the heat of summer knocks them down, loose leaf lettuce is one of those low maintenance pleasures of gardening. There are a ton of varieties of lettuces/salad greens (which we’ll go into in future episodes) right now we are growing a bunch of Deer Tongue and Antares, both from Fedco.
Loose leaf lettuces can be harvested and then they grow again. All you do is cut the lettuce about an inch above the soil line with a scissors, and it will grow back. If you plant a few rows every two weeks, you can get lettuce for most of the growing season. With row covers or cold frames, you can harvest lettuce almost year round.
Eliot Coleman, in his book, the Four Season Harvest, writes at length on how to prolong your lettuce growing season.
Robin Follette writes about meeting Eliot Coleman in her Farm & Garden blog
You can cook garlic scapes, who knew? Here is a video I made about how to. Scapes taste great, and are easy to cook.
Why Cook Garlic Scapes?
To me, garlic scapes are free food. You are growing the plant for the bulb, but up come these curled stems with immature flowers on them. You can cook garlic scapes as you would scallions, but they also make a great pesto. Be aware, its a powerful pesto, maybe you want to add in some parsley too.
When growing garlic, you want all the energy the plant creates to go in to growing the bulb, so the scape is something farmers want to get rid of. Thankfully, scapes taste great. If you are harvesting scapes in your own garden, keep a few on the plant, they serve as a sign that the plant is ready for harvest. Scapes uncurl and point up when its time to harvest the garlic bulb. (Bet you didn’t know that)
If you want to order seed garlic to plant this fall, I suggest Filaree Farm. I’ve listed a few suggested garlic growing books below as well. Watch our garlic growing videos here.
Scapes are like most alliums, they will keep for a while in the fridge, but they get kinda soft. The flip side of that is when you snap off the scape, you don’t want to cut it off to far down the stem, or it is too stiff. Kinda like asparagus that way. The most common way of cooking scapes is a simple saute, but the get along well with other foods.
Like we show in the video, I think grilling the scapes is the way to go. Especially if you want to show off the neat taste scapes have by themselves. Salt them after cooking, it works nicely.
We’re going to have to improve the lighting in the kitchen up at the house, as once again the video is pretty dark. I contemplated re-shooting the whole thing, but i thought it wouldn’t be as fun on a re-shoot. And the whole idea here is low-tech, simple stuff. I promise the next kitchen shoot will be better.
